McQueary walked in on Sandusky raping a child and quietly walked away without making any effort to help the kid. Now McQueary is going to walk away with $12M. Felt like this should be mentioned in the context of today's news: "Penn State coach Joe Paterno knew of earlier allegation against child rapist Sandusky: Report"

In 1990 Michigan was in the middle of a five year streak of winning the Big Ten conference (1988, 1989, 1990, 1991, 1992) under Bo and then Mo. Traverse City Senior High won the Class A state championship in football in 1978, 1985, and 1988 under Coach Ooley. In 1990 there were four Traverse City kids on the Michigan roster: Chris Bohn, Mark Burkholder, Mike Nadlicki, and Dave Weurfel.

In 1989 I moved from a Chicago suburb to Traverse City for the second semester of my senior year, met some really great people, and learned how to do an inverted keg stand. Great place. Beautiful. Some of the finest folks you will ever meet.

Always glad to see Traverse City kids on the roster. Bodes well for The Team.

Honestly you had an egregious typo that I was about to pounce on but I decided to keep reading to the end. After I finished reading I went back to copy and paste the typo and it was gone. How did you know?

Alves and Marcelo are fast, they have phenomenal endurance, they stay upright and goalside when defending, they get up the field in a hurry on the attack, and they can cross. They are hugely athletic and also somewhat technical, and little piss ant UEFA countries have a jizz fest whenever they get one because it means they can run a 4-3-3 and basically attack with 7 players while the lesser endowed dummys have to run a 4-4-2 or worse. Our Yedlin is one of these guys.

These kind of guys are rare in world football but America could probably spit out a hundred a year if we tried. We are flush with these kind of athletes in America. We don't even need to divert our premium athletes away from basketball & American football. All we need to do is give our best youth soccer athletes some time in the outside fullback position, with instructions to get it forward in a hurry and then cross it.

Most of the mgoblog folks who are reading this are probably youth soccer coaches who already do this/understand this anyway. I guess I'm just posting this for the benefit of the curious uninitiated skeptics.

Fear not. There is alot of talk that world football is dominated by little ball magicians, that American doesn't have those, and that America will therefore never be able to compete. Not true. America has more athletes than any other country on the planet and pure athletes are the guys we can plug into four of the most important positions on the field (goalie, outside fullbacks, tackling midfielder). In Econ terms, we have an absolute advantage. Once US Soccer starts recruiting/developing/deploying these athletes properly, we will dominate world soccer like we do all other sports and the Euro weenies will have nothing left except .... cricket? Rugby?

Okay, why the fuck are any countries able to beat us in imitation baseball and imitation football??

Ream did a good job staying on his feet and staying goal-side. The cameraman tried to make it seem like the goal was all on Ream but Ream's teammates left him on an island forever and Howard should have been able to keep that out of the net. The midfielders did not show for the ball which is why Cameron did not have a low-risk passing option. Cameron is the one who decided to make a high-risk pass, but why didn't Johnson/Bradley/Nagbe give him a low-risk passing option? At least one of those guys needs to be assigned to link, no matter what.

We had a bad formation and the wrong personnel. We need a 4-3-3.

Today our outside fullbacks were stay-at-home defenders who only got involved in the attack when we were in critical risk of losing the game. From the get go, the two outside fullbacks need to be able to spint up the sideline, cross balls in, and lead the attack. And when those crossed balls come in, the three forwards need to be able to finish. The three midfielders need to play in the middle of the field (not the flanks), they need to be able to tackle & disposses, and more important, they need to show for the ball so the back five don't have to play long balls.

We do need a guy like Pujol. The best we have is Jermaine Jones, but he is too old. We need a young, sure tackling, bad ass mother f----r in the middle.

We have a forward (Pulicik) who dribbles into multiple defenders and then passes to his unmarked teammate.

We don't really play boom ball/kick and run, which is good. Guys who play that way should not be in the pool. Guys who have a bad first touch (guys like Gyasi, Shea, Altidore) should not be in the pool. The guys who are not eager & able to track back and/or make a run in the 90th minute -- (for example Bradley, Dempsey, Wandolowski) -- should not be on the field.

"The Gators will now be without 10 players for Saturday’s opener, but that number could rise. A source tells Spectrum Sports more players will be suspended in the future due to their involvement in the ongoing UFPD investigation." By Zach Aldridge, Spectrum Sports

The recruiter is like a salesman and the recruit and his family are like customers. The same customers UM pursues are probably going to be pursued by UTX/UGA/SCAR, etc...

The recruiter should probably start by ascertaining the customers' needs.

If one of the needs is to play for a coach that will help the recruit eventually play for a pay check, the recruiter should point to the 19 kids (including Norfleet) who will be playing for a pay check next season. The recruiter should say that this Michigan coaching staff is responsible and that they can do for the recruit what they did for the 19.

When the recruit asks UGA/UTX/SCAR the same thing, the numbers they quote will be smaller and I do think that it will have some bearing.

and those schools usually get the cream of the crop for their respective states. To me, this draft day means our coaches can tell a recruit from TX or GA or CA that they have a better chance of making it to the NFL by choosing Michigan.

The thing I am pondering is "Are Michigan coaches good at spotting guys who are good enough to get drafted in the NFL?"

To me, "Of the players who get drafted in the NFL, how many were spotted/offered by Michigan?" seemed like a good metric. 32 guys were good enough to get drafted in the 1st round of the 2017 NFL Draft and Michigan offered 13/32 (40.6%) of them.

The metric you are suggesting -- "Of the players Michigan spots & signs, how many are good enough to go pro?" -- seems like a good metric, too. This was helpful: http://www.pro-football-reference.com/schools/michigan/ as was this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Michigan_Wolverines_football_team

Conclusion: Michigan coaches are good at spotting & offering talent. Their ability to get that talent to sign for Michigan is not as good, but getting better.

I only took into consideration NFL jobs. I did not take into consideration Japan Football League, NFL Europe, Arena Football, or any of the other places you can earn a paycheck by playing football. My guess is that any recruit who ends up at Michigan has a 50/50 chance of being able to play for a paycheck somewhere when he graduates.

Other tidbits:

The 2017 NFL Draft is still going on so it's too early to tell how many Wolverines will ultimately transition from college football to pro football this year. However we do know that 14 Wolverines were invited to 2017 NFL Combine, 2/3 of whom will get drafted if the 2015 trend continues.

Attending IMG is expensive and inconvenient. I thought people did it because it was a way for their kid to get noticed by college recruiters. But this kid already had a ton of college offers before he transferred. How did attending IMG benefit this kid?